I installed the neo4j Debian package from the debian.neo4j.org/repo stable/ repo on Ubuntu 18.04 and, after adding my TLS certs, it ends up getting stuck in a restart loop with no indication in the logs of what's making it shutdown:

It seems to work if I simply don't add the certs, so I thought they were the issue. Obviously, I don't want to run it in production without those certs, though. :-)

However, if I spin up the DB with neo4j start instead of service neo4j start, it works just fine — lets me use use Neo4j Browser with trusted HTTPS, doesn't hit the restart loop — so I don't think the certs themselves are actually the problem. I'd prefer to use the service / systemctl interface in case the box needs to be rebooted, but I can't figure out why they work differently. Has anyone else encountered this?

It looks like what was happening was that service neo4j start starts the process as the neo4j user, but neo4j start starts the main process as the current user (in my case, I was root on the box), which is where the discrepancy came from. Thanks @michael.hunger!